The challenges of becoming successful at poker

The challenges of becoming successful at poker

All you have to do to beat the game of poker in the long-run is to be diligent enough to learn all the strategies which the various levels of poker thought consist of, right? Wrong. Even though being diligent in your poker-related studies will certainly help you propel your game to a higher level, it won’t be enough to secure your staying ahead of the rest of the pack. The internet features more and more poker articles each day, and what’s even more relevant: it features more useful articles each day too. That means it takes less and less effort on players’ part to seek out the right information and to improve their game.

The game of poker is a living entity. It evolves continuously, and in order to stay ahead of the crowds and to preserve your edges, you too need to be a flexible, evolving player readily taking in the newest trends and acting to adjust your game accordingly.

Take the notion of calling vs raising for instance. Only a few years ago, it was clear that fish called and sharks raised. It was an axiom, a general truth which you could always rely on. Nowadays, that statement is a much trickier one. People read and people watch poker on TV and the internet. The same article that stated the above named axiom a few years ago, may well have been the reason for quite a few people to re-think their calling and raising ways: nowadays, it’s not just the sharks who raise anymore.

Online players – who are usually suffering from a dire overconfidence syndrome anyway – would do anything to play like the greats, and they do attempt to ape them in every possible way. In order to stay ahead of the game, a good player needs to be continuously on the move, taking his game to newer and newer heights all the time.

Let’s take a look at the calling vs raising issue again, this time from a fresh perspective. Calling used to mean weakness. This is generally the same these days as well, but there’s a different meaning behind weakness now. With all the average skilled players going out of their way to be as aggressive as they can be, there’s newfound value in exhibiting weakness now. When you know you have the nuts, merely calling will often prompt your trendily aggressive opponents to try to push you out of the hand by repeatedly betting into you on the wrong read. Add to this the fact that ‘trendy’ players are also likely to put opponents on hands, again – with limited skills – and you have some excellent value in this setup.
These days however, calling can also be a sign of strength. When you are faced with good players, who understand these new levels of aggression, calling in order to show weakness will simply not work, especially not if they understand that you are a higher thought level player yourself.

In these cases, your call will ring a whole bunch of alarm bells, because your opponents will know that your aggression usually means defense of a good yet vulnerable hand, or the creation of better odds through the elimination of opponents who are not willing to face you through hell or high water.

Your call will tell them that you have a hand which doesn’t need exceptionally good pot odds, fold equity or protection.

By raising, you’ll still assert control of the pot. Pot control will enable you to keep the pot size small when you’re working on marginal hands or to increase it when you’re holding the nuts.
One thing that remains static about poker is the rake. This is why you should sign up for rakeback whenever you play in real money cash games or tournaments. Cash games produce more rake (you may even want to consider a poker prop deal here), but you’ll get a rake rebate on your tournament fees as well.